Wednesday, 4 July 2012

Taxi Slang

The other day in a bookshop I found a dictionary of London taxi driver slang. It's a little dictionary and only cost £2.50 but, if you're a Londoner, it's rather fun. (If you're not a Londoner, I fear this post may be dull.)

It's the place names that are pleasant. The Stock Exchange is, apparently, known as Thieves' Kitchen. The twelve back streets that run through Soho from Regent Street to Charing Cross Road are the Dirty Dozen, and Covent Garden is still known as the Flower Pot, despite the fact that there hasn't been a flower market there since 1974.

15 comments:

I love witty names like that. I was visiting Liverpool and asked to get off the bus near the Catholic Cathedral. The driver said something like, "Paddy's Wigwam." As an Australian, I feared he mustn't have understood my accent so I repeated myself after which he clarified that Paddy's Wigwam is what the locals called it and I would understand when I saw it. I did. LOLhttp://www.e-architect.co.uk/liverpool/liverpool_catholic_cathedral.htm

Think! Ivory used to be used for knife handles (and for hafting expensive swords and suchlike). Ivory comes from elephants' tusks, hence the reason why. The castle is probably no more than a howdah, to show it's something of an upper-class elephant.

One of my granddads was a partner in a London Taxi business and he was full of Taxi Slang.I can only recall 2 items:1. “take a cock & hen for an oxford” which translated as a trip with a man & woman which cost the passengers 5 shillings (today =25p)

2. Oxford & Cambridge Terrace was taxi man’s slang for a London street called Sussex Gardens. This was because it was the name of blocks of houses in the street. Youngsters “doing the knowledge” would be failed if they used this slang name at their test

Hi, I'm from Chennai in the south of India, and my native tongue is Tamil. It is interesting to note that the Natural History Museum is referred to as "Dead Zoo". Coincidentally, the museum in Chennai used to be (many years back) referred to by locals, in Tamil, as the "seththa college" or "dead college" (seththa being "dead" and college being the equivalent for a collection of things - not unlike a zoo, if we take a very liberal interpretation) ! I'm just amused at the relatively similar use of the word "dead" out here!

Apart from the special language, there is also a special perception of distance by some taxi-drivers in London, I dare say.:-)

Of course a taxi-distance between two points (hypothetically A and B) is NOT of course a straight line, but even so, going from point A to point B through point C (somewhere in Scotland..) is too much for my mathematical mind.

My favourite book of this and possibly any other Christmas is Mark Forsyth's A Short History of Drunkenness - The Spectator

Sparkling, erudite and laugh out loud funny. Mark Forsyth is the kind of guide that drunks, teetotallers and light drinkers dream of to explain the ins and outs of alcohol use and abuse since the beginning of time. One of my books of the year. Immensely enjoyable. Professor Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

A Short History of Drunkenness is this year's Châteauneuf-du-Pape of Christmas books, no less. Bloody entertaining. - Emlyn Rees

Sometimes you see a book title that simply gladdens the heart. Everyone I showed this book to either smiled broadly or laughed out loud . . . This is a book of some brilliance - Daily Mail

With a great eye for a story and a counterintuitive argument, Mark Forsyth has enormous fun breezing through 10,000 years of alcoholic history in a little more than 250 pages. - The Guardian

Well researched and recounted with excellent humour, Forsyth's alcohol-ridden tale is sure to reduce anyone to a stupor of amazement. - Daily Express

This entertaining study of drunkenness makes for a racy sprint through human history - history being, as Mark Forsyth wittily puts it "the result of farmers working too hard". - The Sunday Times

This charming book proved so engrossing that while reading it I accidentally drank two bottles of wine without realising. - Rob Temple, author of Very British Problems